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IWRM and the Politics of Scale: Rescaling Water Governance in Uzbekistan

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IWRM and the Politics of Scale: Rescaling Water Governance in Uzbekistan water Article IWRM and the Politics of Scale: Rescaling Water Governance in Uzbekistan Andrea Zinzani 1,2,* and Christine Bichsel 3 1 Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK 2 Geography Unit, Department of History, Culture and Civilization, University of Bologna, Bologna 40100, Italy 3 Geography Unit, Department of Geosciences, University of Fribourg, Fribourg 1700, Switzerland; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +39-333-907-1380 Received: 20 December 2017; Accepted: 2 March 2018; Published: 7 March 2018 Abstract: Over the last two decades, politics of scale and rescaling processes in relation to water have been debated by several scholars, especially by geographers and political ecologists, who emphasized their socio-political nature and their interactions with the environment. By contributing to this debate, this paper analyses rescaling processes in water governance in relation to the implementation politics of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in Uzbekistan. IWRM and related initiatives were promoted worldwide, especially in the “Global South”. These initiatives proposed the shift in water governance from administrative to hydrographic, or river basin, units. Empirically, the analysis focuses on the Middle Zeravshan valley in Uzbekistan, where IWRM was promoted as a part of post-Soviet water reforms. The analysis demonstrates that rescaling water governance towards IWRM and hydrographic units is inherently political. The evidence shows that the process is deeply interlinked with interests and power of Uzbek hydraulic bureaucracies at multiple scales. Firstly, the IWRM sponsored establishment of hydrographic units coincided with a recentralization of water management, supported by national hydraulic bureaucracies. Secondly, the design of the hydrographic unit and related boundaries in the Middle Zeravshan valley was driven by controversial multi-scalar power dynamics and relations between national and province levels, which emphasized the complexity and the multi-scalar nature of rescaling processes rooted in Post-Soviet political transformations. Keywords: Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM); politics of scale; development policies; hydrographic units; waterscape; Uzbekistan 1. Introduction Over the last two decades, Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) has achieved the status of the global water paradigm. Advocated by the Global Water Partnership and other international organizations since the end of the 1990s, IWRM has become a widely accepted framework to globally orient water governance towards institutional integration, social, and environmental sustainability [1]. Since the 2000s, scholars and practitioners have critically engaged with the ideas, rationale, logics and outcomes of IWRM in terms of the subjectivities of its experts, governance or the socio-political nature of its central underlying assumptions [2,3]. Despite these contributions, IWRM has only been partially explored for its underlying principles, in particular, its politics of scale and multi-scalar rescaling processes [4,5]. Rescaling processes in relation to water resources have been analyzed and debated in diverse contexts, mainly by geographers and political ecologists. However, the institutional, spatial, and boundary reconfiguration that IWRM implementation processes and politics at diverse scales imply requires further analysis. This paper reflects on one of the central conceptual pillars of IWRM: the proposition that water should be managed according to Water 2018, 10, 281; doi:10.3390/w10030281 www.mdpi.com/journal/water Water 2018, 10, 281 2 of 16 hydrographic rather than administrative boundaries. By focusing on the shift in water governance from administrative to hydrographic units, this paper analyses the politics of scale, rescaling processes, and boundaries changes in relation to the implementation of IWRM at diverse scales in Uzbekistan. The IWRM approach was designed according to the principles of decentralization and devolution of water allocation and distribution directly to private organizations or water users associations, especially in highly centralized states [5,6]. IWRM rests on the overarching rationale of promoting the integration of social, economic, and environmental concerns. It is inspired by the Dublin principles that were discussed during the International Conference on Water and the Environment (Dublin, 1992) (AppendixA). Over the last decades, the framework has been promoted by international and development organizations in both the “Global North” and the “Global South” and adopted in many regions of the world. At the same time, it has also given rise to much criticism. Both academics and water professionals have debated and criticized IWRM for many diverse issues, ranging from the underlying assumptions of the approach, the content and aims of its pillars, to guidelines and politics for implementation [2,4,7–9]. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to discuss the social and spatial assumptions that guide the formulation of IWRM pillars, and in particular the shift from administrative to hydrographic water governance. Second, it aims to contribute and further debates on politics of scale and rescaling processes in water governance through the focus on IWRM implementation processes and the adoption of a multi-scalar qualitative approach in a specific case study. We explore these processes in the context of the Central Asian region, and specifically in Uzbekistan. Whereas water resources in Central Asia have always played a key role for socio-political and agricultural development, since the collapse of the Soviet Union water politics have become even more strategic with regard to bureaucratic changes, processes of state legitimation and consolidation, and international relations. Furthermore, hydraulic bureaucracies, and their divergent interests and complex power relations, have played a key role in both national and transboundary water governance transformations. Therefore, the socio-political and historical context of water politics in Uzbekistan, inherited by the Soviet Union and today influenced by international development policies, offers a particularly relevant setting to discuss politics of scale and rescaling processes in relation to the IWRM implementation. Uzbekistan represents a region where water management played an important role in the succession of different forms of political regimes ranging from the pre-Russian, Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet forms of political rule [10,11]. In Uzbekistan, the IWRM implementation has been promoted and supported since the end of the 1990s by international development organizations (the Global Water Partnership -GWP-, the World Bank -WB-, the Asian Development Bank -ADB-, among others) to shape and orient national water reforms. With regard to the methodology, a qualitative approach was adopted. Empirical data stem from on-site in-depth field research in Uzbekistan. The field site for this research is located in the Middle Zeravshan valley, an area that is administratively included in the Samarkand province. The Middle Zeravshan valley was selected since it is one of the most important river basin of the country. Historically, it is characterized by extensive hydraulic infrastructural development and irrigated agriculture. This region is also relevant in terms of political power since Samarkand, the second biggest city of Uzbekistan, lies in the centre of the Middle Zeravshan valley. Field research was conducted during three distinct fieldwork stays in Tashkent and in the Samarkand province between March 2011 and December 2012. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and informal talks with key informants, experts, and members of the Zeravshan Irrigation System Basin Agency (BISA), the Dargom Irrigation System Authority (ISA), the Urgut Water Users Association, the Institute of History and the Institute of Water Problems of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences. Interviews and talks were also held with representatives of international organizations such as the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the Tashkent branch of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) (AppendixB). Interviews and meetings with selected actors focused on the IWRM implementation, the design of recent national water governance initiatives, and linked institutional Water 2018, 10, 281 3 of 16 changes, units, and boundaries reconfigurations. Data were analysed by adopting an open-coding approach and then linked to collected literature. This paper continues with Section2, which presents and analyses the reconfiguration in water governance from administrative to hydrographic units in relation to the IWRM implementation. In Section3, we advance the concept of scale in order to analyze this reconfiguration, and discuss rescaling processes in the context of water governance. The focus of the next two sections is on the case study of Uzbekistan. Section4 examines and discusses the IWRM promotion and the implementation of related initiatives aimed at rescaling water governance Uzbekistan, while Section5 presents these processes and related multi-scalar power and political implications at basin level in the Middle Zeravshan valley. Our analysis of the Uzbek context is followed by a discussion and conclusions on IWRM and water governance rescaling processes. 2. IWRM: Towards River Basin Governance Our analysis on water governance units and IWRM begins
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